Travis Breaux, assistant professor of computer science in the Institute for Software Research, is the recipient of the National Science Foundation's Faculty Early Career Development (CAREER) Award, the agency's most prestigious award for junior faculty.

The five-year, $600,000 award will support the study of privacy and security policies and their impact on the evolution of software requirements for pervasive and distributed systems. The study aims to help end users, lawyers and software engineers predict changes to software due to changes in contextual and environmental assumptions.

"Mobile and web applications that make our lives easier and more productive are composed of complex systems and services that lack transparency and accountability," Breaux said. "Our goal is to use this award to study new ways to help industry and government agencies better protect personal privacy by demonstrating how systems conform to changing privacy and security policies."

Breaux's research has been funded by the National Science Foundation, Department of Homeland Security, National Security Agency and Hewlett-Packard Labs. He earned a bachelor's degree in computer science from the University of Oregon and a Ph.D. in computer science from North Carolina State. He joined the CMU School of Computer Science faculty in 2010.

In addition to teaching and research, he has chaired the U.S. Association for Computational Mechanics (USACM) Privacy and Security Committee and is a member of the USACM Public Policy Executive Council. He is also a member of the International Federation for Information Processing (IFIP) Working Group 2.9 on Requirements Engineering.